Middle East Watch

Rashid Khalidi, Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and American Dominance in the Middle East (Boston: Beacon Press, 2009)
Patrick Tyler, A World of Trouble: America in the Middle East (London: Portobello Books, 2009)
The first decade of the twenty-first century may well be remembered as the biggest boom time ever for Middle East studies. Jobs in the field were abundant, and publishers, after fretting for much of the 1990s about the future of the monograph, were suddenly in the midst of (...) continue

December 10, 2009, on the International Human Rights Day and the day Obama received the Nobel’s peace prize, the Israeli army paid a visit to the remote village of Khirbet Tana in the northern West Bank, confiscating their tractors and letting the villagers know that their homes would soon be demolished. On request from the villagers and the municipality of Beit Furik, a group of international volunteers from Project Hope visited the village the following day to hear and report their story. (...) continue

The attack was carried out during early morning hours on Sunday as the army surrounded the area and invaded it.
One of the demolished structures is a local school built from bricks with metal girders as a ceiling. Other demolished structures include tin structures for the sheep.
The Palestine News Agency, WAFA, reported that Ghassan Douglas, in charge of the settlements file in the northern part of the West Bank, said that this attack is not the first, and that Israel wants to remove the (...) continue

The Russell Tribunal on Palestine has held a meeting in Brussels to prepare for its first session, to be held in Barcelona from 1 to 3 March 2010. In the tradition of the preceding Russell Tribunals, first on Vietnam (launched by Lord Bertrand Russell in 1966) and then on Latin America, this initiative is an authentic peoples’ tribunal aimed at generating public awareness of the serious and recurrent violations of human rights in Palestine.
Unlike the preceding Tribunals, the aim in this (...) continue

Israel started a preemptive campaign against a EU statement on the Middle East session even before it was formally presented for discussion by EU ministers this week on whether to adopt it. Israeli spokesmen expressed outrage at what they saw as an EU effort to "divide" Jerusalem, and claimed that the European position would "harm the peace process," as if it is only Israel that has been carefully protecting it from the harmful moves of others.
Despite the usual hype, the document, a (...) continue

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More than 1,000 persons from 42 countries who have vowed to travel from Cairo to the Gaza Strip on 31 December in a bid to highlight and (...) continue

Israel is planning to build nearly 700 new apartments in East Jerusalem, government spokesman Mark Regev announced on Monday.
Under the new blueprint, the Housing Ministry has invited contractors to bid on the construction of 198 housing units in Pisgat Zeev, 377 homes in Neve Ya’akov and 117 dwellings in Har Homa.
Palestinians consider Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem to be settlements and say such construction impedes peacemaking.
Israel claims all of the city its capital and does (...) continue